Do you like being preached to? Do you want to sit through a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation?

Well, neither do your customers.

Yes, you need to pitch.

Yes, you need to present your value to your customers.

Yes, you need to show them your whatever…product, demo, pie-chart.

But you need to figure out an approach that works best for your customers, knowing that they will tune out if they get any whiff of feeling pitched.

Sharing stories helps you do that.

In their influential book Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath uncovered a staggering statistic: "…after a presentation, 63% of people remember stories, but only 5% remember a statistic."

So if you’re getting pressured inside your org to deliver a general presentation script verbatim in your pitch meetings…push back. Buyers will tolerate two or maybe THREE slides at the most! (Which basically means you’re using slides to accentuate a point, you’re not using them to pitch.)

Figure out how to tell stories to ensure you and your offering are remembered.